Hey, it's Brian. Zoe, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new host these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people. And for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at uncannyvalleyatwired.com. Thank you for listening. On to the show. Zoe, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I missed you so much. And I missed you the exact same amount. Wow. It's not a contest. Oh my gosh. I feel so loved. I'm going to go away more often. Absence makes the heart go ponder, as we all know, and I'm thrilled to be here. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Leah Feigert, Director of Politics and Science. This week on the show, we're saying goodbye to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who announced that he is stepping down from the top gig at the company. And more than just talking about his legacy at Apple, we'll be looking into what this long-awaited shift actually means for the future of one of the world's biggest companies. We'll also get into why SpaceX and Cursor's potential $60 billion deal announced this week is pretty staggering. And we'll get into Palantir's controversial 22-point manifesto. I feel like manifestos inherently controversial, otherwise they'd be memos, that they posted on X this week. And slowly but surely, we have been seeing certain MAGA leaders and supporters move away from Trump. We're going to break down whether these instances are actually building to something meaningful or just some wishful thinking on the behalf of our Blue Sky followers. So let's kick it off this week with the news that grabbed all of our attention on Monday. It had Brian Barrett calling me, I don't know, 15 times in the span of two minutes. Tim Cook officially stepping down from Apple. If you'd picked up, Zoe, I wouldn't have planned to. Right. I was trying to fill out the goddamn art request. It was really stressful. He has officially stepped down as the CEO of Apple. I think the official transition is September 1st, but the announcement is out there. John Ternus, a longtime executive at Apple, is taking over the CEO gig. This is a pretty pivotal moment for the company. I mean, Cook's legacy, I think, will be twofold. One, in just like honing in on Apple's financials, The company was doing really well, but he took it into the trillion dollar range. And he's also perfected its kind of operations and supply chain. He went all in on making Apple a services and subscription business with things like the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, all of that. So this doesn't sound quite as sexy as like launching the iPhone, but in many ways, he's the person that shaped Apple into what it is today. And rumors about Tim Cook stepping down have been swirling for a really long time. Back in 2024, Wired's Stephen Levy asked him if retirement was on the horizon, and Cook responded like this. I'll do it until the voice in my head says, it's time. And then I'll go and focus on what the next chapter looks like. My life has been wrapped up in this company, as you mentioned, since 1998. This is a long time. It's the overwhelming majority of my adult life. And so it's tough to envision life without Apple. I'm also going to do this job at Wired.com until the voice in my head tells me to stop. Wow. Okay, well, we're going to table that for another time. I think what's really interesting about this moment is Apple obviously is doing phenomenally as a company. Again, trillion dollars, et cetera, et cetera. However, it does feel like it has missed the boat in the AI era. And I think John Ternus's job will be in part to figure out what is Apple's place in the AI race. Well, I think the fact that it's Ternus in general already sort of speaks to that a little bit. Ternus is a longtime hardware engineer, right? It's continuing Apple's history of sort of product people versus AI people, software people. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think on the one hand, yes, Apple is behind in this AI race. On the other hand, Apple hasn't set fire to hundreds of billions of dollars in pursuit of a race. It maybe doesn't even need to win, right? Yeah, it doesn't think it needs to. Its answer to this, I mean, Stephen Levy interviewed Turner somewhat recently and asked again, what are you going to do in the AI era? And his response was very much, we have the iPhone. We think AI apps will exist in the App Store on iPhones, and that's going to be, in many ways, our answer. Not to say they're not going to try and embed AI in different ways, but I still think they think the primary computing platform is going to be Macs and iPhones, the devices that they create. I kind of love this because in an era where we're seeing, you know, sneaker companies, shout out Allbirds, like pivot to AI. I like that there is this massive, very successful tech company that's saying like, yes, we're going to like live with this. We're going to make sure that our subscriptions, our products are adaptable to this clearly very important and instrumental technology. But we don't need to blow up, like Brian said, our entire business plan to make this like a core structure here. I like that for Allbirds because those shoes are absolutely hideous. A parallel might be, so Apple never made a search engine, right? Like search is one of the biggest business in the world. Apple never made a search engine, right? But Google pays Apple's billions of dollars to be the primary search engine on the iPhone. I think Apple's bet is that by building relationships with OpenAI, with Google again, with Anthropik at some point, who knows, it can have that similar, we're just the vessel, right? We're just the thing. And I like their odds because all of the AI hardware that we've seen so far, I know that Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are cooking something up. I know that everybody's got some sort of pendant or speaker or whatever that they're trying to make happen. At the end of the day, I don't think that AI computing is going to replace your phone. I just, I think fundamentally, you're always going to need something with a display and apps and the broader internet versus just something you could talk to and get answers back from. I sincerely hope you're wrong. I'm really wanting an AI hardware device that could be like headphones that you could just speak to and you wouldn't have to look at a screen. But I think you're right that like there will always be certain things we need screens for and that humans are better at just doing ourselves. And then I would like to think there will be a whole slew of tasks that we can eventually offload to AI agents and that would make more sense for like a voice computing paradigm. I do think to the partnership point that you made, Apple has already partnered with Google and it's going to embed Google Gemini into its devices. I think some people saw that as a stopgap, like, okay, it doesn't have frontier models up and running. It's going to use Google in the interim. I saw that as like Apple admitting, we're not even going to try and get into this race in a full-throated way. Like Google's right there. We can use Gemini and that's what we're going to do. Yeah. Now, there's another part of Tim Cook's legacy that I want to ask Leah about because, you know, Tim Cook, of all the Silicon Valley titans who have been friendly and made nice with Donald Trump, Tim Cook kind of stands out in a couple of ways. One that I think he's the only one who presented Trump with like a custom trophy designed by his company's engineers. Embarrassing. I was waiting for you to bring this up, but Brian, just so you know, in my world, We don't call him Tim Cook. We call him Tim Apple. This is just like my president. He is Tim Apple to me now and forevermore. No, this is such an interesting point. And I actually I'm going to throw this back to you guys. What's Ternus's relationship with Trump admin people? We have been seeing their colleagues in the tech industry fawn over the administration in the last year and a half. Apple has simultaneously, while, you know, placating, has also managed to like stay out of the fray in some ways, too. I'm very curious to see how that changes. I think that Cook is a diplomat, first and foremost, and he used that diplomacy to position Apple to get deals that were favorable to the company. I think there was a surprise factor with Trump because he reads as more liberal. There was a feeling that behind closed doors, He wasn't as complimentary of Trump as he was in public. But nonetheless, he was at the inauguration. He was appearing in photo apps. I did actually hear something funny. I mean, this caveat like is a rumor, but from people who are in these types of circles and said that he wasn't aware that he was going to be placed directly behind Trump in the inauguration. And when that placement was put forward, there was a moment of slight panic because they all realized like what the photo was going to look like. But nonetheless, that's the photo. I think two things about the Ternus question specifically One I think we just don know other than I will say like he is going to be the CEO of a major company that has lots of shareholders and he has a fiduciary responsibility to make this number go up Right And the way that you do that is you're friendly with Donald Trump. That's just kind of the way it is. I'm not, I'm not saying that's the way it should be, but I think the idea that he would take a stand against this administration feels far-fetched regardless of what his personal feelings are. The other thing I would say is like Tim Cook's not disappearing. He's going to be the executive chairman. And as part of the announcement, Apple said he is going to be, I don't have the exact phrasing, but something like he's going to be working with leaders across the world. He's going to continue that diplomacy role, basically. I think he's stepping out of his CEO role and into more of a shaking more hands, making nice with world leaders, trying to keep up that sort of diplomatic cadence that he'd already established over the last several years. Yeah. I think the last point that I wanted to make, just going back to like the iPhone of it all, is if AI hardware continues to disappoint, I think that Apple is in a really strong position and the bet that it's making is correct. But I do think that if this like, you know, mysterious Johnny Ives, Sam Altman device comes on the scene and is good, or if something else comes up that is able to like execute voice commands in a reliable way, then I don't know. Like, I think that could be a problem for Apple down the road. Well, Zoe, they've got the Vision Pro. Oh, right, right, right, right. Like, is this the dumbest take, you guys? Like, everyone has an iPhone. Yes, of course. All of these companies have so much to lose, but there is this actual engagement with product that I find so hard to separate, even intellectually. Like, yeah, you can come after a company. They're still going to be like taking their iPhones out on the campaign trail. I mean, everyone had a BlackBerry at some point. Everyone had a MySpace account. Things come and go. I don't know if a better thing comes out. And everyone hates being on their phone. Yeah, I'm waiting here for the iPhone replacement, please. Going to another corner of the tech industry. This week, SpaceX announced a deal with the popular AI startup Cursor to either acquire the company for $60 billion later this year, or if an acquisition doesn't happen, they'll pay him $10 billion for whatever work that they've done together. They said they're going to work closely together to build, quote, next generation coding and knowledge work of AI, which is AI coding tools. Basically, that's what Cursor is known for. It's a little weird. It was unexpected. And it's the arrangement is strange. Zoe, help me understand why it's a potential deal for a rocket ship company buying an AI coding company that relies on other large language models who are competitive. Zoe, help me. Help me. I mean, okay. Well, first I just want to say it wasn't unexpected to me because five minutes before this news came out, I got a call that the news was coming and I thought I had the biggest scoop of my month, if not year. And then sadly, the press release came. So tragic turn of events for me. Biggest almost scoop. I know. However, I think this actually makes some level of sense. Might you recall that SpaceX now owns XAI and that XAI is not incredible at coding models. And so it does need Cursor's help. They put so much into making anime women and non-consensual porn that they couldn't. Right. Yeah. The anime girlfriends took precedence and people, you know, and companies won't pay as much for those anime girlfriends as they will for Enterprise. code. I mean, I really think that this is an under understood thing that is happening in the industry right now. You talk to a lot of people, a lot of investors, a lot of, you know, the Andreessen Horowitz circle, and they're like, Dario Amadei gets up every day and he thinks enterprise code. That man just prints money. He is so focused. He is laser focused on this actual business model and it is working. Sam Altman has a goddamn robotics division. What is he doing? Like, there is the sense that enterprise code is the thing that is working and that if you're going to be a serious AI company, you need to go all in. So like, I don't know, crazier things have happened. However, I think a cursor is in a difficult moment because it has to compete with the major labs. A company agreeing to go into a deal like this with Elon Musk, who famously tried to buy Twitter and then back out despite the very expensive kill fee on that deal as well. Like, I would be hesitant. I don't know what they're kind of thinking right now. Two things. One, the weirdness to me is deeper. Just the fact that SpaceX owns XAI, which owns X, is all just like, we're just putting it all under this weird umbrella. I mean, yes. So weird Elon circus. I have to say, seeing SpaceX AI actually written out whenever this was this week, it was jarring. It was a little bit jarring. This is the thing about getting too rich, is you don't have people around you that will tell you your ideas don't make sense and that they're bad. And I think that that becomes a problem. This is why I never want to have money. But Cursor's announcement I thought was interesting because Cursor didn't announce the acquisition part of this at all. They put out like a pretty terse, I thought, statement, short either because it was rushed or short because they were, I don't know. But all it said- We don't know. We don't know. Allegedly. Allegedly rushed. All we know is that they just said, you know what? We're excited about getting access to XAI's compute. That was basically it. Like nothing about the deal, nothing about the money. Yeah. You know what it made me think of is when Elon Musk told the world that Walter Isaacson was going to be writing his biography. And Walter Isaacson said, what? And then agreed to write said biography. And that man can make things happen by just telling his many millions of followers that things are happening. In terms of making things happen. So this deal is not going to happen until later this year. It was reported recently that the reason was, then this part makes it, this is what makes most sense to me, is SpaceX is gearing up for an IPO. They're getting close to it. And they didn't want to close this deal because it would delay the IPO. So there's sort of an order of operation thing. It's like, we need to go public before we try to close a $60 billion deal. Which, again, feels like everything about this feels, I'm not going to say cursed. It just feels like likely to derail at some point. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, the reporter in me is like really excited for IPO year because I feel like this is when companies really need to get their act together. They need to have their operations, internal processes like really, really, really, really dialed. You're going public. There's going to be a lot of scrutiny. There's going to be a lot of shareholders. SpaceX is trying to do it. Anthropics trying to do it. OpenAI is trying to do it. I think it's going to be a wild, wild time and stuff's going to get weird along the way. Have either of you read Palantir CEO Alex Karp's book, The Technological Republic, or rather how many times have you read it? Right. That's the operative question. I have to admit I haven't read it, but I have read way too many things about it. Unfortunately, I feel like I've read it at this point. Well, and everybody sort of should by now, if you follow Palantir on X, and if you don't, that's okay, just to be clear. It's not an endorsement. But this week, Palantir on X, unprompted, nobody asked them to, but they shared a 22-point summary of Alex Karp's book. They prefaced it with, because we get asked a lot, here's the technological republic in brief. And it goes on to list Karp's ideal vision of tech and the state working as one. There are some points in there, some highlights. Quote, the engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. And also, quote, no other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. There's one more in there that I do want to call out. The draft? You gotta talk about the draft. The draft is a good one. I was gonna go with, some cultures have produced vital advances, others remain dysfunctional and regressive. Yes, it's hard to not read every single point of this manifesto out loud. By saying strong reactions ensued though, we're kind of missing the big one, which is critics online called this fascist. They were like, you are just giving us a point by point of like Palantir's descent into fascism, basically. We spend a lot of time talking about this company. We don't really talk a lot about its origins and like how it views itself in the entire American dream or whatever that means. You know, it was founded after 9-11. It was supposed to be like after this big national consensus where fighting terrorism abroad was the be-all end-all. The company was co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Data aggregation analysis tool powers like everything from businesses to the U.S. military's targeting systems. And more recently, that's meant like targeting systems specifically on immigrants. So the way that CEO Alex Karp talks about this company as this like extended arm of the U.S. government isn't necessarily new. I think that it's just like hitting this very specific point for critics and critics internally as well that are going, wait a second, that's not the country that I actually signed up on. You know, especially this year, ICE and DHS surveillance, its support of military actions in Iran, the company has doubled down on all of these positions We actually have a story coming tomorrow from politics reporter McKenna Kelly about how internally that not being received super well either And then you have Alex Karp who kind of doesn really appear to care And he's like, no, no, no, we're on track. We're going to keep going here. Yeah. And Alex Karp says a lot of stuff all the time. And this feels like an extension of that. So it's maybe I think it hit a nerve because it was the first time people had seen so much of it collected in one place that it was like not something off the cuff on CNBC or at a conference. It was like, no, this is a very intentional statement of values. I think that Alex Karp benefits from being someone who speaks like a philosophy major. Like when you hear him talk, you're like, this man sounds very smart, but like literally what is he saying? So when comms translates that and it's like, okay, we'll break it down for you. You don't have to open the book. Like here's what it all means. Like that's what I think catches people by surprise. Yeah. And it's philosophical ramblings that are packaged in what appeared to be like an authoritarian ultra-nationalist game plan here, which is no surprise why people call it fascist. So here's one thing I know we could quote from this all day. There's a line in there, the pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. Now, what I would say that feels like a very one-sided view of what religious intolerance is, right? I think there is the idea that like, are people intolerant of religion or are they tolerant of all religions and reject the idea of one religion becoming the predominant religion within a government structure, which it should, you know what I mean? Like, I think there's a certain like the perspective is very clear here and it's sort of one the sort of defensive crouch I think doesn't really it's not very self-aware I guess I would say yeah it doesn't hit and maybe maybe that's part of it Ryan and and this is a bad take so this is my episode of bad takes I suppose give me an authoritarian who really really believes this stuff and isn't doing it to line their pockets I'm looking at this and Palantir is making money hand over fist right now so of course they're just going to repeat anything that keeps them in the good graces with the administration. You're watching the administration be at war with companies that even like remotely speak out, whether that's Anthropic or whomever. And just like the idea of that being in the air. No, Palantir is like this institution of choice right now. And we've watched that happen since like week one of the Trump administration. We watched so much of doge come from that. So it's like very hard for me to look at all this and not go, okay, you're also thinking about how this reads to these people that are giving you these contracts. I mean, I think that's true, but I think Karp is a true believer. Like, I do not get the sense from hearing that man talk or looking at his history that he is, like, opportunistically spouting these beliefs now when he didn't believe them before. Like, he seems like someone who has really drunk the—not even drunk the Kool-Aid—has someone who really believes this stuff. He's sort of, like, making the Kool-Aid. He's mixing—stirring in the powder to the water. Yeah, yeah, thank you. I really tried to win that. Yeah, he's the one giving the Kool-Aid to everyone else. But you can't separate that, though, from like how successful that's going for him business-wise. And I think that's like where I keep getting back to when we're talking about like Palantir's activities here, I suppose. Well, I would just, when you listen to someone like Joe Lonsdale, I'm like, that seems a little more apparent to me. Like that is someone who seems like he also really believes this type of thing. and yet, you know, he kind of grew up in an environment where he was being heavily rewarded for espousing these beliefs. And so it's no surprise that they have gotten more hardened over time, I guess. Well, something that's really interesting that comes up in McKenna's article that you can all read on WIRE.com is in Slack, people are having these like kind of intense conversations, right, about what CARP is saying in public, about like their actions in public, like all of these different things. And there's this one quote following the post of the manifesto that I can't stop thinking about, which reads, I'm curious why this had to be posted, especially on the company account. On the practical level, every time stuff like that gets posted, it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the U.S. And I doubt we need this in the U.S. Which is, I guess, like brings back to the business point of who is this benefiting? How is this benefiting them? How long will this benefit them? And at the very least, employees are starting to kind of freak out about it. And I'm curious if that actually leads to any kind of material change, if people actually leave the company, if it's harder to recruit there, or if they get a lot of like, I heard USA, I think too, like, you can't look at this in a vacuum. The fact that this is being released at the same time that Anthropic is having that very public fight with the Pentagon saying, actually, we don't think the government should use these tools for certain things. Like we do have a line where we are not just doing this in service of US supremacy. It is a really interesting dynamic. And this feels almost like you're putting it out there, if you're Palantir, as a sort of, no, actually, you should get in line, Anthropic, and anyone else who thinks that they should have boundaries with the government. Yeah, absolutely. You got to do what you got to do to keep those government contracts rolling in. Talking about the government, I want to keep us there because there are actually, possibly, maybe, perhaps, some changes afoot coming midterm season. Guys, we have to talk about the most recent trend. We've all been noticing it over the last couple of days, couple of weeks, involving the current Trump administration, and more specifically, how very important factions of the MAGA movement have been shifting away from Trump. We're talking like major figures here. We're talking Tucker Carlson this week, quite literally apologized for misleading people on Trump, said everyone's implicated in getting him elected. We're looking at Candace Owens, another major pundit who's been going all against Trump. We're looking at Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in recent weeks and months has been moving against Trump. But everyone's been going really hard on this in the last couple days and weeks. Everyone's a critic now. And it's not just these high-profile conservative figures who have gone through their big abandoning phase. Conspiracy theorists are also abandoning Trump, which has been traditionally his bread and butter for so long. David Gilbert had an excellent piece late last week about how a number of like big folks in the MAGA movement are actually all starting to say that the assassination attempt on Trump's life in Butler, Pennsylvania during the 2024 presidential election was actually staged. Tim Dillon, a podcaster that has historically supported Trump, went in on this. Maybe the assassination was like not something that we we don't know the full story. So maybe it was staged. Maybe it was faked. Why does he talk like that? Should we be talking? Wait, he's very popular. Should we be talking like that? Could you try? Zoe, this is your pivot. I mean, but he wasn't alone. That's what's so crazy. Like influencer Candace Owens, who I mentioned earlier, she also spoke about this too. I find it very strange that Donald Trump is not interested or has appeared to be completely disinterested in determining who fired that shot. To be clear, all of this is being shared without evidence. There haven't been any significant reports that show that any of this was in fact staged, but that really hasn't stopped this wave of MAGA folks in some ways repeating the exact same claims that a lot of like blue-pilled people did in 2024, which was like, this is staged. This was all like against Harris. This was against Biden. This was against all of this. So it's been fascinating watching like truly like the hand shaking emoji come together in that moment. But also to me, I think is a pretty indicative of the party is in a weird place going into the midterms. Polls are lower than they've ever been for Trump. The Republican Party is like already distancing from him on certain elections. I don't know. How serious are you guys taking this? What are you seeing in your circles? Well, I mean, I guess before we even get there, I want to back up and ask you, like, why is this happening? Is it a bunch of small things that are just like culminating? Is it the Iran war? Like, why are people so pissed right now? Epstein was big. Full stop. Epstein, Epstein was really big. He promised to release like everything Epstein-wise. The rollout's been super disappointing. No one's really believed what he's had to say. The like little specific drops from the Department of Justice, especially like everything with Trump's names getting redacted from stuff. So that's been messy. So people have not loved that. And he got a lot of people on his side with a big promise to campaign against like pedophilia in the United States. And like, this was a whole democratic plot. And until, you know, have the Epstein stuff be like so bungled has screwed him for sure. That then combined with Iran, combined with rising prices, combined with all of the stuff, all of a sudden people are just looking at this going, what are we doing here? I'd say too that he even lost some of his manosphere support, Rogan and Theo Vaughn and that over immigration. Andrew Schultz, like there's been like pushback there too I think he keeps doing things that he promised he wouldn do And that is finally catching up Right Anyone base is solid right Like when you talking about the Democratic base the people that are coming out to support Dems year in year out they might be mad about certain actions but they going to keep voting for the Democrats. What's really interesting here, and what we saw in 2016, is that Trump created a new base. And that's why it was so wild for Republicans to watch this, like, you know, former celebrity, like, take the stage in a really, really big way and uniting conspiracy theorists and independents from across different camps. Yes, Republicans voted for him en masse, but he brought a lot of new people under the tent. But over the last, you know, 10 years at this point, the base hasn't wavered. They didn't waver during January 6th. They didn't waver during a variety of different investigations in his first term. So to watch the waiver now, this really is the first time that I can think of following all of this that I'm going, oh gosh, people are shaking. And this is very different than I've seen before. And it's hard to say if it's like a ramp up to the midterms, if it's a ramp up to 2028. Are we picking J.D. Vance? Are we picking Marco Rubio? Are we finally distant, like moving on from Trump as the head of the party? I don't know. And I don't think that the party has decided that yet. But to hear these rumblings is really interesting. I guess my question is, how far is this contagion spreading? Trump has been very vocally attacking back. very long, true social rants against Tucker and against Candace Owens and all that. Do you have a sense, and it's too early to say, well, I guess, I assume, but do you have a sense of this is if he's going to be able to contain this or if this is going to turn into a real four alarm fire for him, especially as the midterms come up? Great question. I think that it's going to take a little bit more time to see. I think we're going to have to see what happens, frankly, with the U.S. economy in like the summer months. Are people going to be able to take road trips or are gas prices going to be just too high because of the Iran war? Simultaneously, and I have to say this, even though this was like the news last week, but I have to bring it up again, staunch Trump supporters, including many of those that we just talked about, are asking if he's the Antichrist. Trump got into fights with the Pope. He has been begging on Catholics in very specific ways to the point that his actual supporters are going on like YouTube lives and saying, is this person that we voted for the Antichrist? So it's all to say that like this isn't necessarily something that is containable, that it takes like truly just another moment, just another Trump, truth social, another missive, another war, question mark, for this to really, really get out of hand. And do we think that the fallout hits J.D. Vance at this point, or is he positioned to like take on the MAGA mantle? Okay, I'm saying this, but I'm saying this to you guys and pretending that we don't have however many listeners we have right now. Millions. Millions. No one likes J.D. Vance. No one likes J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance is beloved by, like, our Silicon Valley folks. Like, that's who's thrilled that he's in office right now. And, like, that was a—been a very clear part. He is, like, in so many ways the figure in between Trump and, like, so many of these folks. And that's been, like—there's been some great reporting on that in the past. But when you're talking about like J.D. Vance, man of the people at the truck stop, giving, shaking, shaking hands, holding babies, et cetera, like that's not him. And I don't really see how he's able to shake like the Trump stink off of him. I live in the Deep South and the midterm races, the advertising has already started and they are still overwhelmingly who is the most Trump Republican is still what people are running on. I'm very curious to see if that changes. And I cannot imagine a world in which that becomes who is the most J.D. Vance Republican. Yeah, that's just I don't I don't know if I see that either. As we know, I could talk about this forever, but we're going to take a quick break. And when we're back, we're going to be getting into a fun slash bizarre story about how a scammer made bank by creating an AI generated woman perfectly tailored for a very specific kind of audience. Stay with us. This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts. Before we wrap up for today, I want to get into a story from E.J. Dixon that we published and got a lot of attention this week. It's a story that honestly kind of perfectly encapsulates the times that we are living in. So EJ talked to a medical student based in India. We call him Sam. It's not his real name. Who was trying to make some money to cover expenses and hopefully migrate to the US after he graduated. After trying a few things, he tried selling his med school notes. He tried making YouTube videos. He landed on a more specific and potentially more lucrative idea. He decided he was going to create an AI-generated woman using Google's Gemini Nano Banana Pro. It's an AI image generator service. And sell bikini photos of her online. because you can't find those anywhere. It's a rare commodity. I really want to hear Leah Feiger have to say Google Gemini Nano Banana Pro. I just feel like that set of words. I won't say it. I just won't do it. Not for me. We'll get there. Thanks. Hold on. He makes this AI-generated woman, but finds out that none of the content is picking up steam. It's not going anywhere. So he goes back to Gemini to ask the chatbot for advice. Gemini goes back and tells him that the pictures were too generic, but maybe he might get some traction if he tailored his AI-generated model to be more MAGA-coded. So you put her in a rifle range, you have her pounding some Coors lights, posting anti-abortion, anti-immigration messages, you get the idea. Would you believe that it took off like a rocket? Oh my Lord. This really is like the story of the times and it's so funny that Gemini was the one to suggest it. Well, and here's the thing. It's also, this is not, there are so many of these accounts. This one was named Emily Hart within a month, had more than 10,000 Instagram followers who then also subscribed to her soft core AI-generated content on OnlyFans competitor FanView. But there are so many of these everywhere. Wait, but Brian, do people know that it's an AI model or do they think it's a real woman? A lot of them don't seem to know. And the ones- They seem very, very unsure. Yes. And some of them are like, I know, but I don't care. Right. Okay. Okay. Okay. But they're all, I mean, because it's all, it's not like you're ever going to meet this person in real life. And I feel like at a certain point, this kind of customer, content consumer, it's all an abstraction anyway at a certain point. But it is interesting how the MAGA specific, and I want to say his MAGA focused creation, hugely successful. he tried making a left-leaning counterpart. He tried doing the Democratic version. No one cared. Did not work. Didn't pan out. Everyone was like, this looks like dumb AI. It only pays to be polarizing. Which is such an interesting part of this whole grift, right? Like the idea that it's a scam. This is entirely a scam. And I'm so taken with the fact that this is from someone who so clearly like has no horse in this race. That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles. Pram Bandy is our New York studio engineer. Mark Leda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Kimberly Chua is our digital production senior manager. Kate Osborne is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director. like Dennis Lehane, author of Gone Baby Gone. I loved growing up in a working class town. I loved the loyalty. I loved the jokes, the sense of family bonds. I don't find that in a lot of the rest of the world. Expertise with heart from all around New England. From the Boston Globe, listen to Say More.
